The importance of data has increased during the last decade while the cost of data storage medium has decreased, thus motivating data storage vendors to provide data protection schemes that are based upon duplication of data.
One of these protection schemes is known as mirroring. Mirroring involves repetitively generating one or more duplicates of data. A peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) relationship can be established with one or multiple targets. The latter relationship is more robust but is much more complex. A PPRC relationship is established between a primary site and one or more secondary sites (also referred to as targets).
A single target PPRC relationship involves using a single relationship copy function. A controller can execute a single relationship copy function in order to copy the data to a single target storage unit.
A primary site that was used to establish a single target PPRC relationship can be required to apply a multiple target PPRC relationship.
The conversion (between single target PPRC relationship and multiple target PPRC relationship) can be very complex and problematic. The complexity results from the vast amount of limitations and/or conditions that define the mapping between a primary site and a secondary site.
There is a need to provide efficient methods, systems and computer program products for copying data.